


Air Gap

by darkcyan



Category: Sophos "Cybersecurity Evolved" Billboards
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:33:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21951508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkcyan/pseuds/darkcyan
Summary: air gap(n)The physical separation or isolation of a system from other systems or networks.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 14
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Air Gap

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hamsterwoman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hamsterwoman/gifts).



> Definition in the summary cheerfully lifted from NICCS' [glossary](https://niccs.us-cert.gov/about-niccs/glossary). 
> 
> Cybersecurity is not my day job; all mistakes are my own. :D

Lightning darts across the sky, the not-so-distant boom of thunder swallowed by the crashing of waves against the rocks, and at his desk the man in the dark coat smiles faintly. 

Though clear walls far stronger than glass surround his body, it takes no more than a thought—less than that, an intent—to become one with the sea; with the waves and the rocks and the dark clouds that fill the sky.

They report back to him that all is well. A handful of attempted incursions, spam and malware tucked in with more legitimate traffic. But nothing that needs his expert judgment; they're all attacks that he has seen before, and has long since integrated into the classification algorithms. 

Child's play, really. 

A light blinks on the laptop screen in front of him; he swipes to accept the call, then flicks to project it at a more comfortable angle in the air above the laptop. 

"Tornado." He inclines his head. "A bit early, are you not?" 

The woman on the other end of the call nods back, her silky black hair and dark blue scarf waving as though in a gentle breeze, despite the immense twisters behind her. "Tempest." 

He had once worn a different name; lived a different life. They all had. But he—they—had chosen to leave that all behind. Even within their circle, it was ... for the best, not to know details about the people they once had been. It reduced the potential attack surface. 

"I have heard," she pauses. "Rumors. But I do not wish to worry the others unduly." 

He raises an eyebrow, and she takes that as the invitation that it is. "Rumors that others may be attempting to reverse-engineer," she gestures outward, "this. And that they may have … help." 

"The data—" 

Tornado's lips quirk. " _Our_ data is secure, as far as I know," she says, her emphasis light but clear. "You would have an incident report on your desk right now, if I thought otherwise. But other storage facilities—" 

Tempest nods. The level of data protection he and his companions provide is the highest their company offers. Lesser facilities—well. The right mistake, at just the right time, and the leak, if there was one, might not have even been malicious. 

"Thank you," he says. "I'll let you know if I hear anything."

"Glacier should join soon," Tornado says. "I asked that she give us a few minutes alone first." 

Tornado and Glacier are in contact far more often than is strictly required. Tempest suspects that there is something—more, there, but he steadfastly refuses to speculate. As long as it does not interfere in their ability to do their jobs—and he's seen no evidence that it has—he sees no reason to needlessly eliminate not one, but two of the best operatives he has worked with. Plausible deniability. 

His screen flashes again, and in the distance, lightning briefly lights up the clouds. Two more flicks, and their circle is complete. 

"Glacier," he says, inclining his head towards the light-skinned brunette in the viewscreen to Tornado's left; her grey blouse is dark only in contrast to the pure white of her desk, computer, and the fields of ice at her back. 

And to Tornado's right, "Sandstorm." The man's windswept hair is roughly the shade of Glacier's; the dust surrounding his glass walls tints his white suit jacket, his skin, and the dunes behind him a dull yellow. "Any signature updates?" 

The other three tap briefly at their computers, and connection requests pop up on Tempest's screen. He accepts them, then sends his own, already scanning the others' notes. Nothing of particular importance, it appears. Good. "Other news?" 

Tornado gives him a meaningful glance. Glacier shakes her head. And Sandstorm—hesitates. 

"It's probably nothing," he says. 

Tempest raises an eyebrow. 

"I know I'm not as good at. All this. As the rest of you yet," Sandstorm says. "But I've been getting ... intermittent errors? Never in very large sections of my curtain, and they're always gone by the time I take another look. So maybe I'm just imagining it?" 

Tempest's first impulse is to agree. Sandstorm is talented, and ramping up as well as any of them did, but he's only been around for a few months. Tempest would be surprised if he _wasn't_ still having the occasional issue. 

On the other hand. 

"That is most likely true," he says. "But keep your guard up. There have been rumors," he nods towards Tornado, "that some important information about our program may have fallen into our adversaries' hands." 

The other two look towards Tornado, and she turns up a palm in a gesture of frustration. "You now know as much as I," she says. "I haven't heard even speculation regarding into whose hands the information may have fallen." 

Although ultimately, it didn't make much difference—if the information had not made its way to the Darknet yet, it would soon. 

Sandstorm visibly swallows. "So, if I feel it happening again—" 

Tempest considers. They meet like this, once every three days, to exchange virus signature updates and see other human faces. Opening a channel outside their curtains is a small risk, but a non-zero one. To do so ad hoc, for something that might be nothing but growing pains—

"Use your judgment," he finally says. "If it starts happening consistently, call an incident if it's something you're concerned about handling alone. Otherwise, get a full dump of the affected area next time something intermittently fires, and we can analyze it together next meeting." 

Sandstorm straightens, looking reassured. "Will do." 

"And the rest of us will do the same," Tempest says. Glacier and Tornado nod. "Anything else?" 

The other three shake their heads. 

"Then good night, and good hunting."

* * *

Three days pass quietly. The filters feed him a quiet stream of destroyed malware the likes of which he could easily have bested when he was twelve—and one particularly clever worm that takes him a full five minutes to sort out. 

He carefully notes that one, and the mitigation steps taken, in his log. 

The lightning storm has drifted to the south; with his desk facing north, it is more difficult to watch the lightning without turning. He considers changing the orientation of his desk, but decides against it. The storm will be easily visible again soon enough. 

Sandstorm has experienced no more incidents, and Tornado has heard nothing further from her contacts, nor Tempest anything from his. 

(He had requested a copy of the incident report, but was informed that no such report—and, in fact, no such incident—existed. Whether that meant that no breach had occurred, or that that facility's post mortems were as shoddy as their security training, was an open question.) 

Perhaps it is nothing. 

But Tempest knows better than to be sure of that yet.

* * *

One week passes. Two. The lightning storm splits in two, and for a few days, the waves strike particularly high. Tempest pulls up a few articles from the monthly data dump they all receive to keep them from getting too bored (as though the job itself wasn’t reward enough) and reads about tides. He consults his calendar and confirms—it's currently a new moon; that's likely a significant contributor. 

(The ceiling to his home is as clear as the walls—but he has lived in the center of this storm for many years, now; he knows better than to expect anything in _his_ skies but deeply layered clouds.) 

The incident alarm flares. 

Tempest immediately stops his contemplation of the ceiling and dials in; less than ten seconds later all four of them are there, though Sandstorm is wiping sleep out of his eyes. 

"Glacier?" 

Normally, his terminal—all their terminals—would be flooding with the results of any investigation so far and all associated data. But instead there's nothing but Glacier herself, face pale. 

"What do you see?" she asks. 

Tempest's eyes narrow. He sees nothing out of place, and while he does not know every detail of the snow-covered mountains behind her, they have worked together for over ten years; he felt certain he'd notice something wrong enough to put that expression on her face. 

"Nothing?" Sandstorm offers. "It looks normal." 

She gestures, and the view rotates. 

A giant crack runs through the ice covering a lake that stretches towards a distant, mist-hidden horizon. Even as they watch, the crack widens, and chunks start to break off and float away. 

"What—" Tornado covers her mouth with a hand, dismayed. 

"So it's not just me," Glacier says. "Well, fuck." 

_Then_ the flood of data begins.

* * *

Their landscapes change, sometimes. Their curtain—their violent, impassible weather—is held in place by the billions of tiny nodes that they each integrate with, a physical barrier to reinforce the electronic one in place between the precious data they protect and the outside world. But there is only so much even modern technology can do to control the weather. Some change is inevitable. 

But Tempest can feel it when the tides change. When the storms shift. When rocks break off the crags dotting his landscape and fall into the sea. 

"It's like the crack isn't _there_ ," Glacier says, several times, increasingly frustrated each time. "I can see it, but I can't _feel_ it." 

The datastream she's shared agrees—there is nothing out of place that any of them can see. 

Which means, of course, that they must go deeper.

* * *

Sandstorm notices next. 

"I can see the sky," Sandstorm says, and he's looking—less yellow, somehow.

* * *

Tempest stands and paces a slow circle around his room, eyeing each crag, each crashing wave, each bolt of lighting. Listening, like he rarely does, for the distant rumble of thunder. It all _looks_ normal. And yet. 

Tornado's data stream suddenly joins Glacier and Sandstorm's. "The farthest out tornado," she says. "It's rotating too slowly." 

It _looks_ normal. But—that particular crag, over there, where a rock has fallen into the churning water below—doesn't look _right_.

* * *

The attacker(s? insufficient information at the moment, so no point speculating) clearly had researched enough to know that Tempest and Tornado were the most senior, and seasoned, of their group. 

Their mistake was in waiting until they'd verified that they were able to crack Glacier and Sandstorm's curtains first. 

"Look for evidence of data harvesting," Tornado says. "If the exfiltration hasn't started yet, it will soon. They can't hide the evidence forever." 

Tempest pays this advice half a thought, focused as he is on the other half of the puzzle: just what mechanism the initial attack used to stay hidden so long, and how to bring it down. 

It is convenient, that Glacier's early warning and the attacker(s)' choice of targets means that only a small subset of Tempest's curtain has been compromised so far. It will make it easier to track down the discrepancies. 

When he receives Tornado's first hypothesis a few minutes later, and a data burst dismissing it several minutes after that, he smiles faintly. 

It is true that no defense is perfect. 

But neither is any attack.

* * *

The analysis takes hours. 

Hours they cannot afford, most likely, if they wish to prevent a breach. But the least secure data is stored in the most easily accessible areas, and they can afford even less to make mistakes. So the damage likely being done—that too, Tempest chooses not to focus on. 

And then finally— _finally_ —their rapid-fire exchanges bear fruit. A phone-home mechanism is found and quashed, then the technique it used to fake the signals telling each of them that their curtain was functioning properly, and everything unravels from there. 

A hasty patch is created and applied. It protects against this specific incursion, but the question of how to harden the underpinnings of how each of them interact with their weather—that will be a much larger, and hairier, issue to sort out. 

But for now, it is done. 

Tempest unbends from around his laptop and looks at his three companions. 

Sandstorm's desk is littered with coffee cups. Tornado's with papers covered in diagrams. 

The crack in Glacier's ice is still there—none of their curtains are exactly what they were—but it is already starting to slowly heal. 

He can no longer remember who contributed what to the investigation; whose was the final breakthrough. All he knows is—

"Well done," he says. "We've done what we can for today. Get some rest." 

The other three nod. "Are all incidents like this?" Sandstorm asks. 

"Not in the past," Tornado says. "But we'll see what the future holds." 

It's not reassuring; it's not supposed to be. That's what this job is. 

Sandstorm looks intrigued at the thought. It's a good sign.

"And don't forget to have your draft report ready to discuss in our preliminary post-mortem tomorrow."

Glacier and Sandstorm groan, and Tornado laughs. "See you then!" she says, and signs off.

Alone again, Tempest leans back in his chair and looks up at the sky.

The stars are bright, tonight. 


End file.
